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Gordian Software

“If you look at trends in software, you see a macabre parody of Moore's Law. The expense of giant software projects, the rate at which they fall behind schedule as they expand, the rate at which large projects fail and must be abandoned, and the monetary losses due to unpredicted software problems are all increasing precipitously. Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine. That's not a coincidence, since they are the two most complex technologies we try to make as a society. Still, the case of software seems somehow less forgivable, because intuitively it seems that as complicated as it's gotten lately, it still exists at a much lower order of tangledness than biology. Since we make it ourselves, we ought to be able to know how to engineer it so it doesn't get quite so confusing.”